Inkle and Yarico
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Inkle and Yarico is a comic opera first staged in London, England in August 1787, with music by Samuel Arnold and a libretto by George Colman the Younger.
The opera was highly successful, performed 98 times at the Haymarket Theatre, and a total of 164 performances on London stages by 1800. There were also performances in Dublin (1787), Jamaica (1788), New York (1789), Philadelphia (1790), Calcutta (1791), and Boston (1794).
[edit] Plot
Inkle, an English trader, is shipwrecked in the West Indies, and survives with the help of Yarico, a Negro maiden. They fall in love, but when Inkle returns to his civilization, he plans to sell Yarico into slavery to recover his financial losses while he marries a woman, Narcissa, who will give him the social standing he wants. In the end, Inkle repents and marries the faithful Yarico.
[edit] Origins
The supposedly true story first appeared in Richard Ligon's book A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657).
Richard Steele's Spectator printed another version in March 1711, in which Yarico is a Native American, sold into slavery while bearing Inkle's child.
[edit] External Links
- excerpt from Linda V. Troost's The Rise of the Comic Opera
- Original 1711 Spectator text